Help! I’ve Married the Wrong Person!
Genesis 29:15-30
Bob Moeller writes: "I never met my grandmother. She died on the dusty, lonely plains when my father was 17 years old. Yet my father credits her with pointing him toward God. A few summers ago, when I attended a large family reunion, I heard some unknown history about my grandmother, now gone for over 50 years. She had been a mail-order bride. My grandfather was homesteading on the prairie where there were very few women. She had answered an advertisement he had placed in the paper….As my grandfather was dying, he asked everyone to leave the room except my two oldest sisters. He was then 89, a widower for nearly 30 years. `Do you know why I never remarried?' he asked in a raspy voice. They shook their heads no. "`Because when your grandmother died, I realized I could never love another woman as much as I loved her.' And then writes, "If my grandfather and grandmother began their marriage through a mail-order arrangement and yet learned to love each other that deeply, who's to say that God can't do something just as extraordinary in your marriage? If, like Jacob and Leah, you started out all wrong, who's to say God can't use your relationship to bless not only your lives but future generations as well?"
Our Scripture today is the story of Jacob, whose name means “the one who takes the rightful place of another.” Jacob was a weasel and a deceiver, having conspired with his mother to trick his own father into giving him the family blessing and inheritance rather than to his older brother, Esau. When Esau found out, he sought to kill Jacob forcing his mother to send Jacob away to her relatives to save his life. When Jacob arrived at the well where his mother’s family waters their flocks and a shepherdess named Rachel was there. It was love at first sight. When he met her, he kissed her and began to weep what appear to be tears of joy. He negotiates with her father Laban for her hand in marriage, agreeing to work for 7 years to wed her. When the wedding day finally came, Laban arranges the party. When it was time for the Jacob and Rachel to consummate the relationship, unbeknownst to him his new father in law gives him Leah who is described as weak-eyed or very unattractive, rather than Rachel who was beautiful. In that culture, a woman would have been heavily veiled so Jacob was none the wiser. They consummated the marriage in the dark of the night and Jacob rolls over in the morning and the woman beside him is not the woman of his dreams.
The same thing has happened to many couples. We wake up one day and think we’ve married the wrong person. Three things contribute to this. First is our differences. Bill Hybels writes, “I dated Lynne (his wife) off and on for five years, but it was not until after the wedding date that I found out the awful truth. Lynne was strange. She was not normal like me.” She turned out to be a near recluse and Bill was an off the charts extrovert. She was oversensitive. She’d watch a sad movie and couldn’t sleep because she was up crying all night. Bill would tell her about a couple who had gotten in financial debt and she couldn’t believe that he wasn’t going to help them. His way was to let them dig themselves out and learn their lesson the hard way. Lynne had to have everything planned even on vacations and Bill loved to live by spur of the moment. He then goes on to tell the story of Pygmalian who found a unique way to solve the differences between he and his potential wife. Out of the finest ivory, he sculpted the woman of his dreams. When done, he bowed and prayed and she came to life and lived happily ever after. That’s what many of us try to do with our spouses. We take a chisel and chip away all of the rough edges, flaws and differences of our spouses and try to make them to be more like us. We each think we’re normal and thus try to change our spouses. If there is one thing I’ve learned in 25 years of marriage it’s this: God has this way of putting people together who are totally different. If you are a spender, I can guarantee you married a saver. One of you is a neat freak and the other is freakishly messy. John Gray’s bestseller says, “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.” I’m starting to think we’re living in completely different galaxies. Here’s the moral of the story: no one is wrong here. It’s just a matter of perspective. Just because you’re different and that may bring conflict doesn’t mean that you’ve married the wrong person. It just means that you’re human and the old adage “opposites attract” is true.
Second is unmet expectations. Jacob has an expectation that he’s marrying the beautiful Rachel, but he wakes up with her older sister Leah. We all go into marriage with expectations. Expectations come from many sources such as parents, values, our culture or even Hollywood. There are three very common expectations for marriage. Couples expect their marriage to work out and never end in divorce, to be faithful to each other in every way and that their marriage will be a smooth ride without any major upheavals or adjustments. Expectations can be even smaller than that. He has an expectation of what she’s going to wear to bed. She has an expectation that he’s going to love her no matter what she wears and that he just wants her to be comfortable. The problem is that most of the time our expectations aren’t vocalized, it’s just assumed the other person views it the same way. And that’s when we become disenchanted, disappointed, upset, angry, bitter and sometimes even taking the attitude that we’ll never make it. Expectations are the causes of most conflict in marriages.
Third, underestimate God’s blessing. When Jacob is going to die, he has to make a decision – to be buried with Rachel or Leah. Here’s what he decides: “Then Jacob instructed them, ‘Soon I will die and join my ancestors. Bury me with my father and grandfather in the cave in the field of Ephron the Hittite…..And there I buried Leah.’” Genesis 49:29-31 Jacob spent his whole life wanting someone else instead of the wife he had and it created nothing but problems in his life. Bu at the end of his life, the one who he thought was the wrong person was actually the one who had been the blessing. Don’t make this mistake! Your spouse is a blessing to you but we often forget that.
If you’ve been thinking that you’re married to the wrong person, what are you to do? The relationship you’re dreaming of isn’t with someone else. You can have what you’re looking for with the one you’re with. But it’s going to take 6 things. First, change how you see your spouse. Your spouse is a child of God. They are special, unique, and made in God’s image. Recognize that the one you’re with is God’s blessing to you. After the CMA Awards this past Spring, Blake Shelton showed up at his wife, Miranda Lambert’s concert in OKC. They ended up singing a duet of Blake’s song: “God Gave Me You.” The spouse you have now is the one God gave you. You have to look at them as God’s blessing to you. “They say that you marry the one you love. My advice is to love the one you marry.” You can do that when you see them as God’s gift to you.
Second, learn to fight fair. How? James 1:19-20 “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” The question isn’t if you fight in your marriage. The question is how well do you fight? One of the best things you can do is to create a set of ground rules for arguing, what’s warranted and what’s not. Things like, “Under no circumstances will either of us raise our voice.” No bringing up the past. No cuss words or name calling. So often when we fight, we want to win the battle. If you do, then you may lose the war. If only one of you wins, you both lost because you’re both on the same team. You have to remember that you aren’t enemies. Instead, if your goal is to find a common, agreeable solution for the good of your marriage. That builds trust in your relationship. No marriage has zero conflict - the married people who don’t fight are being honest and real with each other. It’s about fighting well.
Third, confront issues you’ve been avoiding. Many husbands and wives never confront the issues they have. They stay silent allowing resentment to build up or they leave, taking the easy way out. You’ve got to deal with your issues. That’s key to developing emotional intimacy. Fourth is patience. Realize that change doesn’t happen overnight. Once you confront the problems, it takes time to see results. You may even need to receive counseling to help you work through your problems. Fifth is forgiveness because you can’t make it work and still hold onto all the hurts. We’re called to forgive as we have been forgiven. You can’t live in the past and expect to have a future. Sixth, resolve to do whatever it takes. If you don’t, it’s not going to work. The relationship you want is possible with the person you’re with as long as both of you are willing to put each other first and work at it. You can run from the problems you have in your relationship all in the name of “We’re not soul mates” or you can have the courage to stay. Finding someone else won’t solve it. The divorce rate of 2nd and 3rd marriages is more than 70%. One way to do that is to become the person God intends you to be. You didn’t marry the wrong person. We just have to be open to God transforming us into His image because that’s the purpose of marriage, to shape and mold us in Christ’s image. We can focus on our spouse being the wrong person, but maybe we need to focus on becoming the right person for our spouse.
One of the biggest challenges to marriage is marital drift. What happens to couples when they fall in love is they’re intimately close. Then they get married, kids come along with their extracurricular activities and they focus so much of their time and energy on them. Careers take off and individual interests are developed and before you know it, you stop focusing on each other. One day, you then look at each other and say, “Who are you?” Then you start to think that maybe you’ve married the wrong person and that you need a new start rather than getting real in our relationships and dealing with your issues. The day we let go of the idea that there’s this soul mate out there for us and looking to next one as our ticket to happiness, we’ll start trying to fix the marriage we’re in. The truth is that great marriages choose to make it work. Love is a choice!
Ravi Zacharias’ tells the story his brother going to their father and said, “You know, Dad, I’ve always maintained even when we were in India that I’m only going to marry the girl you choose for me. I guess I am ready now. Would you please begin a search for a girl for me to marry?” Ravi really didn’t believe he’d go through with it. We were living in Toronto, thousands of miles and a cultural planet away from the land of our birth. But this was his choice. He wanted my parents to help in “The Search.” My father and mother said, “Fine. Tell us the kind of young woman you’re looking for.” So, his brother gave his “ideal partner” speech and proceeded to describe the kind of person he would choose to marry.
Under normal circumstances, the parents would travel around and look for somebody that met the criteria, but in this instance my brother said to our father, “Look, you really don’t need to do that. Why don’t you just write to your sister in Bombay and let her do the groundwork? We’ll just correspond back and forth and take it from there.” Thus began his quest and what I called our family entertainment hour every night around the table. My father wrote to his sister, and in response came numerous letters with suggestions, photographs, and information sheets ad nauseam. Oh, the jokes that would fly! The unsolicited advice from every member of the family was profuse. The sarcasm, wondering whether this poor woman had the faintest clue of HIS shortcomings!
Each night, his brother would look over all the pictures, study the lists of accomplishments and qualifications, and say, “What do you think of this one, Rav? Isn’t she lovely? Look at the description. She’s even the church organist.” I could not resist pointing out how important a feature that was for a successful marriage. He narrowed the “applicants” to a short list and, finally focusing on one person, began to correspond with her. Then they advanced to telephone conversations, but not many because that was “too expensive.” One could tell that reality was closing in. Finally, believe it or not, they both felt this was it. The dates for the engagement and the marriage were set with these two never having met. My brother and my father flew to Bombay. More than 1000 wedding invitations were sent before my brother and his bride-to-be had ever seen each other. Two days after his arrival was the engagement date and a day or so later was the wedding date. He would then bring his bride back to Canada, all within a week, and they would live “happily ever after.” That, at any rate, was the plan.
Ravi began to get really concerned, so before my brother left for Bombay, I mustered up the courage to caution him. I said, “I don’t want to challenge anything you’re doing, but I do have a brief question. What are you going to do when you arrive in Bombay, come down the Jetway and see a young woman standing there with a garland in her hand, and say to yourself, “Good grief! I hope that’s not her. I hope that’s somebody else!” Or she looks at you and thinks to herself, I hope that’s not him. I hope that’s his brother! What on earth will you do?”
My brother just stared at me and said, “Are you through? Write this down, and don’t ever forget it: Love is as much a question of the will as it is of the emotion. And if you will to love somebody, you can.” That statement brought our conversation to a sudden stop. That was 35 years ago. My brother and his wife now have three children and make their home in Toronto. Has it been easy? No. Marriage never is but the challenges they face do not come from an absence of commitment. Amen.
